Monday, December 2, 2013

An Unexpected Thanksgiving Gift

In pursuing a research strategy leading up to a trip to Ireland late in
2014, I’ve been systematically reviewing and documenting what I’ve already
discovered on the various branches of my husband’s paternal
one-hundred-percent-Irish line.

Of course, best intentions can sometimes encounter resistance.
If you’ve been a regular at A Family
Tapestry, you are probably aware that November was not the easiest of
months for me. The beginning of the month brought our family a sad loss in the
passing of my aunt—my mother’s only sister, for whom I was named.

You may also recall that, before leaving my aunt’s home in
the Columbus, Ohio, area last month, I found and carefully
packed several items of family memorabilia to bring back home. There was a lot
of material to follow up on.

You know how time, intentions and obligations mix. Something
inevitably comes up and even the best intentions get laid aside for a more
convenient time. For the rest of November, I hardly had a moment to spare to
explore these documents, letters, newspaper clippings and photos I had garnered
from old storage boxes and albums in my aunt’s home.

After realizing I was literally moping over all this sense
of loss—not to mention, having boxes sitting out on shelves in my home, now demanding their own
rightful place to be stored—I decided this weekend to switch directions and lay
aside my Ireland research plans and focus, for a little while at least, on
these Davis and McClellan lines of my Southern maternal heritage.

As for the rest of my maternal line, well, perhaps the
reason I never pursued further research on these surnames was that I already
knew others had blazed the trail ahead of me. Somehow, as much of a struggle as
it has been to even work my way back to a mere 1850, I
enjoy the thrill of the hunt with the many undocumented paths my husband’s
lines have taken over gliding down the smooth, broad highway of time travel back to the
1700s and even 1600s in documentation others have provided for some of my own
maternal lines.

But now, in the wake of the Thanksgiving holiday, and with
thoughts of the soon-approaching Christmas celebration, I’m flooded with the nostalgia
of family memories. I can’t help thinking about those, like my aunt, who will
no longer be with us to once again pick up the family traditions. Perhaps this
will be not only a convenient time, but a therapeutic time—why resist the urge
to delve into all those items I’ve found?—to set aside my Ireland focus and
turn my attention to the more immediate details of my own family history.

So that’s what I began doing this past weekend: poking
around what could be found online for my Davis
family and related lines. I wasn’t too surprised that it didn’t take me long to
stumble upon details others had documented and posted online. I had already
seen that while working my way back to the 1850s in that small village in the hills of eastern Tennessee—the town of Erwin, to be specific—in past research
attempts.

It was in the Davis
line that, this weekend, I discovered someone else had documented a link to the Tilson line—a family
named in the D.A.R. database, already. Here was another way to trace my
connection back to a Patriot. I wasn’t surprised. I had heard from family that
this line had been in the New World for a long time.

A second detail popped up shortly after that discovery: a
connection to the Mayflower. While I will have to prove this assertion for
myself, it was a pleasant and timely discovery on this Thanksgiving weekend—though
the doubtful side of me is demanding an explanation for how a seagoing vessel
(admittedly headed originally for the Virginia plantation) arriving in
present-day Massachusetts could yield descendants who were decidedly Southern in
heritage.

All this will reveal itself in good time, I am sure. For
now, I’m just basking in the timeliness of discovering I may have a closer
connection to the Pilgrim story than I had ever imagined.

4 comments:

My mother's family came from both the Virginia and Plymouth Colonies - with a smattering of a few Germans from Philadelphia/Lancaster. There was a "migration" southwards since the British government wanted the Native America's to "have the lands west of the Appalachian mountains".

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for posting that link, Iggy. Looks like I face a steep learning curve, now that I've got to consider just how those Southerners originated from arrivals in Plymouth. Understanding the "thoroughfares" of the times used for their migration patterns helps.

About Me

It is my contention that, after a lifetime, one of the greatest needs people have is to be remembered. They want to know: have I made a difference?
I write because I can't keep for myself the gifts others have entrusted to me. Through what I've already been given--though not forgetting those to whom I must pass this along--from family I receive my heritage; through family I leave a legacy. With family I weave a tapestry. These are my strands.